The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was founded in 1810 and the first missions for the Ottoman Empire were established in 1819. Continuously growing and expanding its field of activities, the ABCFM quickly become influential in most of the provinces of the Empire, especially in areas of orphan relief, education and health. Apart from the general aim of conversion, the American missionaries wanted to inculcate certain values of 'civilization' to the people of the East especially in the areas of family life, cleanliness, order, child-rearing, nutrition, and hygiene. For them, “ the social life of Orientals was one of great degradation” and the Ottomans were “living and eating and sleeping like domesticated animals”. Criticizing many aspects of life at home, missionaries tried to enforce standards of sanitation, hygiene and appearances in their educational programs. Physical hygiene was especially underlined in missionary writings on orphans. Long descriptions of their bodily features were provided, telling to how they were received in a miserable condition with dirt, sores, and vermin and how they were tamed in the hands of the missionaries into clean, good-looking, and well-behaved children. Orphan girls, coming “literally in rags” were furnished with “plain but neat cotton or woolen dresses”. Those “wretched little creatures” were turned into neat, clean, obedient, and rapidly learning students. As dirty, half-starved, and neglected orphans, they were “other children”, based on otherness of need, poverty, and undesirability. The missionary relief, thus, made them both “children” and believers. As a useful tool to convince the world of believers and benevolent contributors that these orphans were civilized into good Christians, before-and-after photographs were utilized to exhibit the progress realized with these “other children”. Thus, they were not only physically cleaned and cared for, but they were transformed into “sleek, bright and interesting” children and true members of the Protestant community. This paper will explore how bodily and physical conditions were utilized by the American missionaries as material representations and mirrors of religious and moral state of children in the late Ottoman Empire. Based on both written and visual material in official missionary journals, memoirs of missionarie, and the ABCFM archive of internal correspondence, this research intends to show that, as tangible proofs and easily malleable targets, children's bodies were part of the missionary agenda in their general aspirations of civilizing and proselyting.